I think it would have been acceptable if she had something like http://www.lucasnurserysucks.com but she didn't have the right to take the domain name that was the name of the company.
Interesting. How many "Lucas Nursery" businesses do you suppose there are out there? Besides landscaping and plants, there might be nursery schools under that name as well. How do you decide who has the "right" to take the domain name?
Domain names are generally first-come, first-serve for exactly that reason. It's pointless to say whether she had the "right" to the domain name; they weren't trying to do business online and they didn't have a website, so she beat them to the punch.
I'm suprised that it wasn't decided that she was using their name to trick potential customers into going to her site, since many people assume companyname.com will work. It'd be similar to someone registering slashdot.com (if it wasn't already registered) to make an anti-Slashdot site.
No, it would be different in an important way. They weren't using the web to do business. They didn't accuse her of cybersquatting (i.e. they didn't go out and try to get the domain so that they *could* use it for business, and then find she had it). The difference between slashdot.org and slashdot.com is very slight and somewhat confusing, but the difference between Lucas Nursery, an RL business with no net presence, and lucasnursery.com, with no content implying that it's owned by the nursery, is a bit more pronounced.
I would love to have a card that can hold up to about $100 that is anonymous and which I could use for bus fare, parking meters, road tolls, or small purchases like meals.
This exists for parking meters. West Hollywood isn't the only city that has these, either; Pasadena and Glendale have them too, and Beverly Hills has the meters installed but hasn't bothered selling the keys yet.
I'm not positive whether or not it's anonymous, but from talking to the guy who is in charge of city-owned parking (such as curbside metered parking) they don't seem to be collecting usage data. In fact, one of the issues they currently are working on is interoperability between different cities... although the hardware supports it, they don't have a system worked out for revenue sharing. He mentioned that they'd probably have to divide it up proportionally according to how much was used in each city each month, so if they have data on who is using their Cash Key where, they're certainly not making use of it.
Re:Credit cards are free, why pay $200?
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 1
Credit cards are free, why pay $200?
Your credit cards are *free*? Even the ones I have that don't have an annual fee charge me interest... and I'm sure that some of that interest pays for printing new cards when they expire, break, or get lost.
Like others, I consider it something wallets and purses already take care of. This would just be something else to carry around, and until cash money is entirely eliminated the convenience factor of it (even if perfectly secure) isn't that significant in my eyes.
What I would like most about it is "carrying" all of my cards around, but not being able to use them without my thumbprint. That way, even if I leave it behind by accident, it can't be used by someone else.
Granted, as others have mentioned, making this device available might be making identity theft a lot easier. But if you're using it legitimately, it seems like it should increase security a good deal.
Re:OMG you are a genious.
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
However, to this day, I will not use a debit card in place of a credit card. At least with a credit card, you have protection. A debt card just comes right out of your bank account.
It comes down to bank policy. My credit cards, by law, have a cap of $50 of personal liability if they are stolen. But my debit card, by WFB policy, has a cap of $0. Which card will *I* use? Hm...
No, he agreed to host it for free. Then, as soon as it became popular (and the cops came to rely on it), he started saying that he will shut it down unless they pay him an obscene amount of money. If he offered a reasonable price or offered to hand over the website to the department, he would be all right. That's not what he did, however.
Erm... no, you don't have it quite right.
"As soon as" -- well, after two years of running the site for free, he told them he couldn't afford to keep doing it, and asked to negotiate a price. Then, after a YEAR of getting nowhere with that, and trying to fund the site via advertising revenue, he pulled the plug. He brought in the $300k figure, apparently, to tell them what they *would have* paid for the site over the three years he'd been running it if it *hadn't* been donated, which was a tool of negotiation. $300k for three years of maintaining and hosting an interactive site with over 600 pages to it seems like a fairly reasonable price, though maybe a bit high. It doesn't amount to extortion, however.
The article in the Detroit Free Press is a bit more informative. One thing they bring up is that the Macomb sheriff's department didn't want to pay *at all* for the site, no matter how much... otherwise, they would have used the County's hosting.
- Rather than backcharging, he's brought up the $300,000 as the cost of the site if he *hadn't* been doing it pro bono for the last three years, i.e. the value of what he's given them.
- He spent a year trying to get them to move over to a compensation system, but they weren't willing to pay *anything*, much less what it actually costs to have a site like what they apparently had.
- After unsuccessfully trying to fund the site with advertising revenue, he pulled the plug. Not feeling particularly friendly toward the guys who didn't think his work was worth anything, he didn't hand it over for nothing.
The article in the Detroit Free Press (thoughtfully provided by another user) gives a bit more insight into the story. My favorite part is when the sheriff says that he didn't want to use the County's hosting because it would cost taxpayers money. Doesn't sound like they were negotiating in good faith about this issue.
Still, if it was such a busy site before, you'd think that *most* of the former visitors would find it.
Well, the old site had over 600 pages of info etc. The new site is butt-ugly and has about 15 pages. So they might have 70% of their users back, but still only be getting a tiny fraction of the hits, because the site simply isn't as sticky as it used to be.
His "bill" may not have been for bandwidth. Here's the article from the Detroit Free Press.
Very interesting article. My favorite quote:
Some sheriff's departments, including those in Oakland and St. Clair counties, have Web sites run through the county. Hackel said he didn't want the county to run his department's site to ensure it wouldn't cost taxpayers any money.
Just in case anyone was thinking that the Macomb County Sheriff's Department thought that *any* price was reasonable for their site...
In addition, the very idea that a small county website is generating 3.5 million hits per month is absolutely laughable. It's just not inside the realm of possibility.
Well, hm, is it?
Macomb County has a population of 788,149 as of the 2000 Census. Of those, 97% live in urban areas (while across Michigan state only 75% do). The median household income is $52,102, which is 17% higher than the statewide median. 68% of the population is over 25, a slightly higher proportion than for the state as a whole. Of those, the men tend to be slightly better educated, and the women slightly worse. Since women account for a larger proportion of both populations, overall, Macomb County lags slightly behind the state as a whole for educational attainment. In spite of this, 83% of Macomb residents hold at least a high school diploma, and 17% have a Bachelor's degree or better. Half the population has at least been to college for a few months.
Maybe a more useful number is the total households in Macomb: 309,502 as of the 2000 census. So that's just over 11 hits per month per household. My understanding is that a "hit" is each time a page is loaded, so a single visit to the site might consist of several hits. The current site, which is described as "bare bones" compared to the old one, has tips on driving in bad weather, news about suspects that have been apprehended, and other useful tidbits. I could see 50% of the households in the (relatively wealthy, overwhelmingly urban) county of Macomb each generating 20 hits per month, if they wanted to keep up to date on the news and weather and the site was useful to them.
But, maybe I'm wrong. Who knows? Not us, that's for sure.
The guy volunteered to host and maintain the site in exchange for free publicity. Then he decided to stop doing so. But instead of handing the site and the domain over to the police department, he decided to try to shake money out of them. That certainly sounds believable, and the department's reaction is quite understandable.
I see. So if I do volunteer work for another entity without any sort of contract, with the clear disclaimer on all the work that I own it, and then I decide to stop doing it, I have to turn over my work for free or be thrown in jail?
Who "owns" a domain name? In this case, he offered to set up the site for publicity. He registered the domain name, the site always said that it was owned by his company, and then he stopped providing the free service (after a year of trying to negotiate a new deal where they would pay him for it). The domain name and the data has value to the sherriff's department (obviously), and they have NO AGREEMENT that he is to turn over the data or domain name to them if he stops hosting the site. So of course, it's perfectly understandable that they would throw him in jail and confiscate his equipment if he wanted them to pay for it.
He might have asked for an unreasonable amount, and he might have even felt a bit malicious about it. Certainly, he had them up a tree, but they did do a lot of the climbing themselves. Still doesn't seem to me to be that obvious that he committed any crime.
He basically took a public service that he agreed to provide for free, waited until the public and sheriffs office got used to using it, then refused to turn it over.
Let's see. He provided the service as a volunteer for at least two years. Then, about a year ago, he realized it was taking up too much time and resources to continue to provide for free. He approached them about payment. After a year of negotiating or whatnot, he said, ok, I'm not going to provide this service anymore, and shut down the site. So they took his computers and threw him in jail.
The amount he asked for may have been unreasonable. It may have been greedy for him to keep ownership of the domain name, but it had always been that way and no one had ever made comment on it. It doesn't seem anywhere near cut-and-dried that this guy deliberately got them "hooked" on their website to extort the County government. It sounds a bit more like everyone got screwed by not having a coherent contract for services in place from the beginning, and now one side has more power than the other, and is using it.
I'm referring more to common things like getting basic peripherals working, or a graphics card, or setting up XFree86 to use your monitor correctly, or getting a mousewheel to work. All things that automatically work in certain other operating systems.
All things that sometimes work automatically and sometimes don't in "certain other operating systems". I have visited MS and third-party knowledge bases for ALL of those things (well, not for getting XFree86 to use the monitor correctly, but DirectX? Sure) over the past few years, all in Windows.
The government awarded you the patent. Then the government setup a court system for you to use to get paid for your patent. Is it too much for the government to ask you in return to be certain your position is correct before you sue?
You can be certain your position is correct, and still lose. That's the problem with your idea.
Civil cases are decided on a preponderance of the evidence. It's both a matter of how much information each side can throw at the jury, *and* how credible the jury thinks the evidence is. You can hire an expert witness who costs you $20k and looks great on paper, with all kinds of credentials and experience, but if the jury doesn't *believe* him as much as the guys the other team puts forth, you're out $20k plus whatever the other team spent on *their* experts. (This happened in a trial that I was on the jury for. The plaintiff brought in an expert that rubbed everyone on the jury the wrong way, in spite of a list of credentials a mile long. In the end, we decided he didn't have any motivation for saying what he said besides the $20k in his pocket for showing up.)
Civil courts are not an objective testing process. They're a competition. In many cases, there's more to presentation in who wins and loses than there is to how "good" a case is. So certainty that you're right won't win; good lawyers and good evidence will. And you don't know until you walk in if your lawyers and evidence are better than the other team's.
There could be limits on the amount that the loser has to pay. Or you could just win. Or, as I said above, don't sue.
What about if you *get* sued?
Maybe "loser pays if they are the plaintiff" would make slightly more sense. It would still effectively remove the ability of anyone but a megacorporation to sue a megacorporation, but it would be less inclined to be abused by megacorps that want to eliminate smaller competition.
now we have trackable cellphones (which are becoming ubiquitous), rfid chips, red-light cameras with OCR, etc. pretty easy and non-paranoid to imagine the automated abiity to track anyone anywhere.
True, but thankfully, in many cases, the agencies who have control of the technology are very reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement.
A week ago, my Transportation Planning class went on a field trip, where (among other locations) we visited the Route 91 Express Lanes and the ATSAC (made famous by "The Italian Job") Control Center. Route 91 has license plate cameras and OCR equipment which identifies toll evaders when they enter the Express Lanes as well as 35 incident cameras along the 10-mile route, and ATSAC has cameras all over Los Angeles which can watch intersections and streets for incidents. *Both* agencies mentioned that law enforcement has repeatedly approached them for cooperation and information, and that they *never* allow it without a court order.
I think the reasoning was best expressed by the engineer at ATSAC, who said that if they used their cameras for enforcement, it wouldn't be long before the cameras were routinely vandalized and smashed to bits.
It's not about what the technology can do; it's about who controls it and what they perceive as their responsibility.
No, I don't think so. "The court of public opinion" does not ware a black robe with "Judge" embroidered on it. The Judge, if he / she is worth 10 cents of what it cost to go to law school, will consider the facts, not "the court of public opinion." In either case, SCO will lose, and bad.
*If* their case doesn't have merit, but if you read the ancestor posts in this thread, there's a glimmer of a possibility that it does.
And if they win the case, that will be extremely damaging to the Linux community, as people will in general draw erroneous conclusions about all the other FUD that SCO has spewed over the past several months.
Google wouldn't lower Any rates, they would add a new middle, registered rate. The purpose of this rate being to remove spam. If this registered rate charges by keyword, the spammers could not possibly keep up. They have some algorithm where they have possibly thousands of keywords on their pages that get spidered and they also link to other spam search pages. If each of these sites had to register these 1000's of keywords, it could not be profitable.
This sounds like it would remove a lot of the usefulness of Google, because most of the sites that just happen to have the info I'm searching for would never bother registering those particular keywords (or any keywords at all).
I could see them offering two different services, such as having this registration system set up on Froogle. But the cool thing about Google is it finds me stuff that didn't know I was looking for it.
Remember way back when Yahoo had a simple interface with only two images on the very-quickly loading home page.
Ahhh... nostalgia.
And what's more compelling to note about the old Yahoo! interface... there are *so many* sites that copied it, because it worked. Many of them still use the same format today (even though Yahoo! long abandoned it in favor of more AOL-style angry fruit salad).
I don't see the 'decline in Unionization' as what' s lead to job loss.
Neither do I. But I can't see either blaming current job loss in this country on unionization, since unionization is on the decline and the jobs that are going overseas these days are mostly non-union.
the RIAA isn't suing as a revenue generator, they're suing to scare kids into not copying and distributing songs.
But I thought the point was that copying and distributing songs was "stealing" revenue from the RIAA?
In which case, they *are* suing as a revenue generator... under the unproven assumption that if people don't copy and distribute songs, they will buy them instead.
It is like McDonalds was selling licenses to eat Subway sandwiches and strongly implying it was illegal to eat at Subway without one of these licenses
I can see it now...
"McDonald's has proof that Subway sandwiches incorporate trade secret and copyrighted elements of the Secret Sauce(TM). Because it is a trade secret, we cannot divulge this proof. Consider this notice that consumption of Subway sandwiches is tantamount to theft of McDonald's intellectual property. By the way, because of Subway's use of the 'lose weight' advertising gimmick, all of their sandwiches are now public domain."
"McDonald's is now prepared to release information that will demonstrate incontrovertibly that Subway is in violation of our Secret Sauce(TM) copyright. We can demonstrate that Subway uses this particular pickle recipe in their sandwiches, which is clearly the same used in the Secret Sauce(TM)."
- Followed by announcement from Heinz Corp. that those pickles are their product, have always been their product, and predate the birth of Ray Kroc.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would have been acceptable if she had something like http://www.lucasnurserysucks.com but she didn't have the right to take the domain name that was the name of the company.
Interesting. How many "Lucas Nursery" businesses do you suppose there are out there? Besides landscaping and plants, there might be nursery schools under that name as well. How do you decide who has the "right" to take the domain name?
Domain names are generally first-come, first-serve for exactly that reason. It's pointless to say whether she had the "right" to the domain name; they weren't trying to do business online and they didn't have a website, so she beat them to the punch.
I'm suprised that it wasn't decided that she was using their name to trick potential customers into going to her site, since many people assume companyname.com will work. It'd be similar to someone registering slashdot.com (if it wasn't already registered) to make an anti-Slashdot site.
No, it would be different in an important way. They weren't using the web to do business. They didn't accuse her of cybersquatting (i.e. they didn't go out and try to get the domain so that they *could* use it for business, and then find she had it). The difference between slashdot.org and slashdot.com is very slight and somewhat confusing, but the difference between Lucas Nursery, an RL business with no net presence, and lucasnursery.com, with no content implying that it's owned by the nursery, is a bit more pronounced.
I would love to have a card that can hold up to about $100 that is anonymous and which I could use for bus fare, parking meters, road tolls, or small purchases like meals.
This exists for parking meters. West Hollywood isn't the only city that has these, either; Pasadena and Glendale have them too, and Beverly Hills has the meters installed but hasn't bothered selling the keys yet.
I'm not positive whether or not it's anonymous, but from talking to the guy who is in charge of city-owned parking (such as curbside metered parking) they don't seem to be collecting usage data. In fact, one of the issues they currently are working on is interoperability between different cities... although the hardware supports it, they don't have a system worked out for revenue sharing. He mentioned that they'd probably have to divide it up proportionally according to how much was used in each city each month, so if they have data on who is using their Cash Key where, they're certainly not making use of it.
Credit cards are free, why pay $200?
Your credit cards are *free*? Even the ones I have that don't have an annual fee charge me interest... and I'm sure that some of that interest pays for printing new cards when they expire, break, or get lost.
TANSTAAFL.
Like others, I consider it something wallets and purses already take care of. This would just be something else to carry around, and until cash money is entirely eliminated the convenience factor of it (even if perfectly secure) isn't that significant in my eyes.
What I would like most about it is "carrying" all of my cards around, but not being able to use them without my thumbprint. That way, even if I leave it behind by accident, it can't be used by someone else.
Granted, as others have mentioned, making this device available might be making identity theft a lot easier. But if you're using it legitimately, it seems like it should increase security a good deal.
However, to this day, I will not use a debit card in place of a credit card. At least with a credit card, you have protection. A debt card just comes right out of your bank account.
It comes down to bank policy. My credit cards, by law, have a cap of $50 of personal liability if they are stolen. But my debit card, by WFB policy, has a cap of $0. Which card will *I* use? Hm...
No, he agreed to host it for free. Then, as soon as it became popular (and the cops came to rely on it), he started saying that he will shut it down unless they pay him an obscene amount of money. If he offered a reasonable price or offered to hand over the website to the department, he would be all right. That's not what he did, however.
Erm... no, you don't have it quite right.
"As soon as" -- well, after two years of running the site for free, he told them he couldn't afford to keep doing it, and asked to negotiate a price. Then, after a YEAR of getting nowhere with that, and trying to fund the site via advertising revenue, he pulled the plug. He brought in the $300k figure, apparently, to tell them what they *would have* paid for the site over the three years he'd been running it if it *hadn't* been donated, which was a tool of negotiation. $300k for three years of maintaining and hosting an interactive site with over 600 pages to it seems like a fairly reasonable price, though maybe a bit high. It doesn't amount to extortion, however.
The article in the Detroit Free Press is a bit more informative. One thing they bring up is that the Macomb sheriff's department didn't want to pay *at all* for the site, no matter how much... otherwise, they would have used the County's hosting.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it is that:
- Rather than backcharging, he's brought up the $300,000 as the cost of the site if he *hadn't* been doing it pro bono for the last three years, i.e. the value of what he's given them.
- He spent a year trying to get them to move over to a compensation system, but they weren't willing to pay *anything*, much less what it actually costs to have a site like what they apparently had.
- After unsuccessfully trying to fund the site with advertising revenue, he pulled the plug. Not feeling particularly friendly toward the guys who didn't think his work was worth anything, he didn't hand it over for nothing.
The article in the Detroit Free Press (thoughtfully provided by another user) gives a bit more insight into the story. My favorite part is when the sheriff says that he didn't want to use the County's hosting because it would cost taxpayers money. Doesn't sound like they were negotiating in good faith about this issue.
Still, if it was such a busy site before, you'd think that *most* of the former visitors would find it.
Well, the old site had over 600 pages of info etc. The new site is butt-ugly and has about 15 pages. So they might have 70% of their users back, but still only be getting a tiny fraction of the hits, because the site simply isn't as sticky as it used to be.
Very interesting article. My favorite quote:Just in case anyone was thinking that the Macomb County Sheriff's Department thought that *any* price was reasonable for their site...
In addition, the very idea that a small county website is generating 3.5 million hits per month is absolutely laughable. It's just not inside the realm of possibility.
Well, hm, is it?
Macomb County has a population of 788,149 as of the 2000 Census. Of those, 97% live in urban areas (while across Michigan state only 75% do). The median household income is $52,102, which is 17% higher than the statewide median. 68% of the population is over 25, a slightly higher proportion than for the state as a whole. Of those, the men tend to be slightly better educated, and the women slightly worse. Since women account for a larger proportion of both populations, overall, Macomb County lags slightly behind the state as a whole for educational attainment. In spite of this, 83% of Macomb residents hold at least a high school diploma, and 17% have a Bachelor's degree or better. Half the population has at least been to college for a few months.
Maybe a more useful number is the total households in Macomb: 309,502 as of the 2000 census. So that's just over 11 hits per month per household. My understanding is that a "hit" is each time a page is loaded, so a single visit to the site might consist of several hits. The current site, which is described as "bare bones" compared to the old one, has tips on driving in bad weather, news about suspects that have been apprehended, and other useful tidbits. I could see 50% of the households in the (relatively wealthy, overwhelmingly urban) county of Macomb each generating 20 hits per month, if they wanted to keep up to date on the news and weather and the site was useful to them.
But, maybe I'm wrong. Who knows? Not us, that's for sure.
The guy volunteered to host and maintain the site in exchange for free publicity. Then he decided to stop doing so. But instead of handing the site and the domain over to the police department, he decided to try to shake money out of them. That certainly sounds believable, and the department's reaction is quite understandable.
I see. So if I do volunteer work for another entity without any sort of contract, with the clear disclaimer on all the work that I own it, and then I decide to stop doing it, I have to turn over my work for free or be thrown in jail?
Who "owns" a domain name? In this case, he offered to set up the site for publicity. He registered the domain name, the site always said that it was owned by his company, and then he stopped providing the free service (after a year of trying to negotiate a new deal where they would pay him for it). The domain name and the data has value to the sherriff's department (obviously), and they have NO AGREEMENT that he is to turn over the data or domain name to them if he stops hosting the site. So of course, it's perfectly understandable that they would throw him in jail and confiscate his equipment if he wanted them to pay for it.
He might have asked for an unreasonable amount, and he might have even felt a bit malicious about it. Certainly, he had them up a tree, but they did do a lot of the climbing themselves. Still doesn't seem to me to be that obvious that he committed any crime.
He basically took a public service that he agreed to provide for free, waited until the public and sheriffs office got used to using it, then refused to turn it over.
Let's see. He provided the service as a volunteer for at least two years. Then, about a year ago, he realized it was taking up too much time and resources to continue to provide for free. He approached them about payment. After a year of negotiating or whatnot, he said, ok, I'm not going to provide this service anymore, and shut down the site. So they took his computers and threw him in jail.
The amount he asked for may have been unreasonable. It may have been greedy for him to keep ownership of the domain name, but it had always been that way and no one had ever made comment on it. It doesn't seem anywhere near cut-and-dried that this guy deliberately got them "hooked" on their website to extort the County government. It sounds a bit more like everyone got screwed by not having a coherent contract for services in place from the beginning, and now one side has more power than the other, and is using it.
I'm referring more to common things like getting basic peripherals working, or a graphics card, or setting up XFree86 to use your monitor correctly, or getting a mousewheel to work. All things that automatically work in certain other operating systems.
All things that sometimes work automatically and sometimes don't in "certain other operating systems". I have visited MS and third-party knowledge bases for ALL of those things (well, not for getting XFree86 to use the monitor correctly, but DirectX? Sure) over the past few years, all in Windows.
What was your point again?
The verocity
Was that supposed to be ferocity or veracity? Or some new genetically-engineered hybrid species (now illegal in Mendocino County, California)?
The government awarded you the patent. Then the government setup a court system for you to use to get paid for your patent. Is it too much for the government to ask you in return to be certain your position is correct before you sue?
You can be certain your position is correct, and still lose. That's the problem with your idea.
Civil cases are decided on a preponderance of the evidence. It's both a matter of how much information each side can throw at the jury, *and* how credible the jury thinks the evidence is. You can hire an expert witness who costs you $20k and looks great on paper, with all kinds of credentials and experience, but if the jury doesn't *believe* him as much as the guys the other team puts forth, you're out $20k plus whatever the other team spent on *their* experts. (This happened in a trial that I was on the jury for. The plaintiff brought in an expert that rubbed everyone on the jury the wrong way, in spite of a list of credentials a mile long. In the end, we decided he didn't have any motivation for saying what he said besides the $20k in his pocket for showing up.)
Civil courts are not an objective testing process. They're a competition. In many cases, there's more to presentation in who wins and loses than there is to how "good" a case is. So certainty that you're right won't win; good lawyers and good evidence will. And you don't know until you walk in if your lawyers and evidence are better than the other team's.
Then don't sue.
There could be limits on the amount that the loser has to pay. Or you could just win. Or, as I said above, don't sue.
What about if you *get* sued?
Maybe "loser pays if they are the plaintiff" would make slightly more sense. It would still effectively remove the ability of anyone but a megacorporation to sue a megacorporation, but it would be less inclined to be abused by megacorps that want to eliminate smaller competition.
now we have trackable cellphones (which are becoming ubiquitous), rfid chips, red-light cameras with OCR, etc. pretty easy and non-paranoid to imagine the automated abiity to track anyone anywhere.
True, but thankfully, in many cases, the agencies who have control of the technology are very reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement.
A week ago, my Transportation Planning class went on a field trip, where (among other locations) we visited the Route 91 Express Lanes and the ATSAC (made famous by "The Italian Job") Control Center. Route 91 has license plate cameras and OCR equipment which identifies toll evaders when they enter the Express Lanes as well as 35 incident cameras along the 10-mile route, and ATSAC has cameras all over Los Angeles which can watch intersections and streets for incidents. *Both* agencies mentioned that law enforcement has repeatedly approached them for cooperation and information, and that they *never* allow it without a court order.
I think the reasoning was best expressed by the engineer at ATSAC, who said that if they used their cameras for enforcement, it wouldn't be long before the cameras were routinely vandalized and smashed to bits.
It's not about what the technology can do; it's about who controls it and what they perceive as their responsibility.
A silly statement, but arguably not much more of a logical leap than assuming a plot to derail XFree86.
Or than assuming that a freelance web designer named Mike Rowe is going to be confused with MS...
No, I don't think so. "The court of public opinion" does not ware a black robe with "Judge" embroidered on it. The Judge, if he / she is worth 10 cents of what it cost to go to law school, will consider the facts, not "the court of public opinion." In either case, SCO will lose, and bad.
*If* their case doesn't have merit, but if you read the ancestor posts in this thread, there's a glimmer of a possibility that it does.
And if they win the case, that will be extremely damaging to the Linux community, as people will in general draw erroneous conclusions about all the other FUD that SCO has spewed over the past several months.
Google wouldn't lower Any rates, they would add a new middle, registered rate. The purpose of this rate being to remove spam. If this registered rate charges by keyword, the spammers could not possibly keep up. They have some algorithm where they have possibly thousands of keywords on their pages that get spidered and they also link to other spam search pages. If each of these sites had to register these 1000's of keywords, it could not be profitable.
This sounds like it would remove a lot of the usefulness of Google, because most of the sites that just happen to have the info I'm searching for would never bother registering those particular keywords (or any keywords at all).
I could see them offering two different services, such as having this registration system set up on Froogle. But the cool thing about Google is it finds me stuff that didn't know I was looking for it.
Remember way back when Yahoo had a simple interface with only two images on the very-quickly loading home page.
Ahhh... nostalgia.
And what's more compelling to note about the old Yahoo! interface... there are *so many* sites that copied it, because it worked. Many of them still use the same format today (even though Yahoo! long abandoned it in favor of more AOL-style angry fruit salad).
I don't see the 'decline in Unionization' as what' s lead to job loss.
Neither do I. But I can't see either blaming current job loss in this country on unionization, since unionization is on the decline and the jobs that are going overseas these days are mostly non-union.
the RIAA isn't suing as a revenue generator, they're suing to scare kids into not copying and distributing songs.
But I thought the point was that copying and distributing songs was "stealing" revenue from the RIAA?
In which case, they *are* suing as a revenue generator... under the unproven assumption that if people don't copy and distribute songs, they will buy them instead.
It is like McDonalds was selling licenses to eat Subway sandwiches and strongly implying it was illegal to eat at Subway without one of these licenses
I can see it now...
"McDonald's has proof that Subway sandwiches incorporate trade secret and copyrighted elements of the Secret Sauce(TM). Because it is a trade secret, we cannot divulge this proof. Consider this notice that consumption of Subway sandwiches is tantamount to theft of McDonald's intellectual property. By the way, because of Subway's use of the 'lose weight' advertising gimmick, all of their sandwiches are now public domain."
"McDonald's is now prepared to release information that will demonstrate incontrovertibly that Subway is in violation of our Secret Sauce(TM) copyright. We can demonstrate that Subway uses this particular pickle recipe in their sandwiches, which is clearly the same used in the Secret Sauce(TM)."
- Followed by announcement from Heinz Corp. that those pickles are their product, have always been their product, and predate the birth of Ray Kroc.